Tag: harm

On 28th January, 2015 I gave the Police Foundation‘s Ideas in American Policing lecture on the topic of harm-focused policing. This brief blog provides some background details to the talk. Please note that for a number of reasons (including photograph copyright) I am not distributing copies of the PowerPoint slides.

Harm-focused policing weighs the social harms of criminality and disorder with data from beyond crime and antisocial behavior, in order to focus police priorities and resources in furtherance of both crime and harm reduction.

Example information and data sources could include drug overdose information that could help triage drug markets for interdiction, traffic fatality data to guide police patrol responses, and community impact assessments to prioritize violent street gangs. For a summary of the core of the presentation and a grey-scale version of some of the graphics, please see:

You can visit the journal site and access the paper here (or here) and watch my annotated video of the lecture below (you might want to make it full screen so you can read the slides).

During the presentation, I had a couple of quotes. Here are the quotes and their sources.

“to establish priorities for strategic criminal intelligence gathering and subsequent analysis based on notions of the social harm caused by different sorts of criminal activity”. The source for this is page 262 of Ratcliffe, J. H. & Sheptycki, J. (2009) Setting the strategic agenda. In J. H. Ratcliffe (ed.) Strategic Thinking in Criminal Intelligence (2nd edition) Sydney: Federation Press.

“Weighting crimes on the basis of sentencing guidelines can be justified on good democratic grounds as reflecting the will of the people. …… it remains far closer to the will of the people than any theoretical or even empirical system of weighting that academics might develop.” The source for this is Sherman, L. W. (2013). Targeting, testing and tracking police services: The rise of evidence-based policing, 1975-2025. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and Justice in America, 1975-2025. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Page 47.